Norman Shumway, who has died of cancer aged 83, always shied away from the sweeping if seemingly appropriate tag that he was the father of heart transplantation. In his laconic way he would point out that surgeons had been "switching round hearts" for much of the 20th century and he disdained newspaper fame. But at Stanford Medical Centre in California, where he and Richard Lower developed the procedure of successfully transplanting a heart from one living body to another in the late 1950s, press attention reached its peak in December 1967 when the world's first human heart transplant was carried out in Cape Town by Christiaan Barnard (obituary, September 3 2001).

Shumway had been on the brink of medical history for months. He and Lower, in the preceding eight years, had used Shumway's invention of topical hypothermia - which cooled the heart and extended the time in which it would remain protected during surgery. They had transplanted more than 300 canine hearts while Adrian Kantrowitz, their contemporary in New York, had attempted more than 250 such trials.

Barnard, by his own admission, had failed consistently with a mere 48 experiments. His dogs rarely lived for more than a day while the three Americans' animals were often frisky a year after transplantation. Shumway and Lower had spent years studying ways to counter the inevitable rejection of the transplanted heart while Barnard decided to "take a chance" after 13 months in the field.

Barnard had been given the idea of attempting a heart transplant after watching Lower at work in his laboratory in September 1966. Lower did not know that Shumway and Barnard had worked together 10 years earlier at the University of Minnesota, where open-heart surgery had been pioneered by their mentors John Lewis and Walt Lillehei. Shumway was as self-effacing as Barnard was self-absorbed; and they had never liked each other. That Shumway should lose the "race" to transplant the first human heart to Barnard, of all people, was a bitter irony.

The world was gripped by transplant fever and Barnard became one of the most famous men on the planet. Barnard, Kantrowitz and Shumway, between them, carried out the first five human heart transplants in just over a month. Shumway was appalled that reporters scaled the walls of Stanford in an attempt to glimpse his first patient, Mike Kasperak, a steelworker who died 14 days later after "a fantastic galaxy of complications" unrelated to the transplant.

Barnard delighted in the publicity, and was linked with stars such as Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. Suitably inspired, other cardiac surgeons around the world began their own transplants. The surgery was not complex, but the post-operative consequences of rejection were brutal. Most recipients were dead within weeks, days or even hours.

By the early 1970s almost every transplant programme around the world, beyond Stanford, had shut down. Shumway resisted all calls for a moratorium on transplantation, arguing that the procedure would become routine. Even when Lower was charged with causing "wrongful death" in a million-dollar lawsuit after using the heart of a brain-dead man in a 1968 transplant in Virginia, Shumway persevered.

Shumway and Lower, who was acquitted in 1972, were determined to prove that immunology and physiology were the cornerstones of transplantation. As Barnard slipped into personal chaos, the two pioneers continued their research and achieved increasingly positive clinical results. By the early 1980s, with the advent of cyclosporine, which the Stanford programme was quick to use, Shumway had begun to conquer rejection. In 1981, Bruce Reitz and Shumway carried out the world's first successful heart-lung transplant at Stanford.

Today more than 4,000 heart transplants are carried out annually around the world and 85% of recipients live for at least a year. More than three-quarters live a normal life for more than five years while the world's longest surviving recipient is alive 27 years after his transplant. This, Shumway argued, is the only legacy that matters.

While famous for his warmth with those he trusted, Shumway gained a media reputation as a JD Salinger-style figure. Yet he was far from a recluse, and could be found most mornings at Stanford's transplant centre, joking with nurses, secretaries and even the odd surgeon. Shumway was only Salinger-esque in his refusal to be interviewed, but, thanks to Lower, he did talk to me. I was struck by the way in which the "king of transplant surgery" wore baggy trousers and tennis shoes. Shumway laughed loudly, recalling the dingy laboratory in San Francisco where he and Lower had worked and "when it rained you had to put a bucket on your desk to catch the water".

He was most moving when he spoke about his lone professional setback. "It seemed cruel," he said of Barnard's transplant. "What is it they always say about the first? We all know the first guy to get to the north pole or to step across the moon. It's just the second or third guy's name which is a little more elusive. I understand the whole drama of being the first. I've lived with it a few years now." But on our last meeting Shumway said: "Maybe it was a blessing we weren't the first. We had enough trouble with the press and all that hoo-hah. Maybe it all worked out for the best."

He is survived by his former wife, Mary-Lou, and their four children, the oldest of whom, Sara, directs heart transplantation at the University of Minnesota, where Shumway and Barnard once worked together.

· Norman Shumway, cardiac surgeon, born February 9 1923, died February 10 2006